Children and Scars of Covid-19 Pandemic in India: Issues and Challenges

This volume discusses the various challenges faced by children in India from different perspectives such as education, psychology, and sociology during the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights the nature of undocumented struggles of refugees, children with special needs, girl children/ girl child, child labourers, children from SC/ST and other disadvantaged communities and migrant children in India. The book examines the lack of a social justice framework to cater to children’s needs and wellbeing. It discusses how intersectional location of these children in caste, class, gender, ethnicity, and religious locations shape their ability to access welfare and rights across sectors such as health, education, nutrition, and security. The book puts forth recommendations to ensure better intervention mechanisms to address issues faced by children from all sections of society and paves the way to counter the emerging challenges in future.

This book will be of interest to students, teachers, and researchers of education, psychology, sociology, social work, childhood studies, and development studies. It will also be useful for educationalists, sociologists, social psychologists, lay public and those interested in exploring the condition of various marginalized children in India.

Abhimanyu Datta is Lecturer at the District Institute of Education and Training, Sonitpur, Assam. He has completed M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Before joining the current job, he worked as Assistant Professor at MGAHD-TISS Nagaland and as Guest Faculty in the Department of Social Work, Assam (Central) University. As an Early-Stage Researcher under the International Research Staff Exchange Scheme, he worked with the Research team at Coventry University (UK) and Kocaeli University (Turkey) in 2016. He was also a Dalai Lama Fellow (SanFrancisco, USA) and implemented one year Action Project under the fellowship programme during 2014-2015.

Bipin Jojo is Professor and Dean, School of Social Work, at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. He was a commonwealth visiting fellow to School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London during 2008-09. He was a visiting professor to University of Tampree, Finland in 2018 and also delivered lectures at University of Bilbao, Spain and Masaryk University, Czech Republic. He served as the chairperson of Centre for Social Justice and Governance during 2006-2012. He also served as the chairperson of International Relation Office at Tata Institute of Social Sciences during 2009-2012.